This week’s big story on the CultMarx front was the firing of Google employee James Damore. The firing offense was, he had written a document titled Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber and circulated it on Google’s internal network. The document was leaked to journalists, the nation’s CultMarxists threw a collective fit of hysteria, and Damore got the push.

The topic of the document was the representation of sexes in Google’s workforce. Damore came at the topic from an attitude of biological realism, buttressed with references to human-sciences literature. Some random samples:

“Google’s Left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence.”

“I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.”

“Women, on average, have more openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas.”

“Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things.”

“In addition to the Left’s affinity for those it sees as weak, humans are generally biased towards protecting females.”

“The same compassion for those seen as weak creates political correctness, which constrains discourse and is complacent to the extremely sensitive PC-authoritarians that use violence and shaming to advance their cause.”

You can read the whole thing at its very own website, diversitymemo.com. Note the supporting hyperlinks—suppressed by Gizmodo when it published the memo, which it shamelessly then criticized for “lacking empirical support.”

The document closes with a list of constructive suggestions, among them, “De-moralize diversity … Stop alienating conservatives … Have an open and honest discussion about the costs and benefits of our diversity programs … Be open about the science of human nature …”

The document is all written in an earnest, reasonable tone. It actually came across to me as a bit cucky. Damore for example uses the CultMarx jargon term “gender” to mean “sex.” There are flashes of virtue-signalling: “I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more.”

Those elements of cuckiness notwithstanding, I totally support James Damore. He’s a fellow spirit: an open-minded, curious empiricist who believes in an external world and thinks that by careful inquiry we can understand it. As he told us in his interview with Stefan Molyneux, “I really like understanding things.”

The ironies have been much noted. A guy writes a memo saying that women on average are more emotional than men; women respond by shrieking and fainting … and so on. Steve Sailer’s been covering the story very diligently.

The only thing I’d add, because I don’t think it’s gotten enough attention, is a grudging, qualified, very slightly sympathetic word on behalf of Google.

The context here is employment discrimination laws, especially federal ones. They are really driving this whole story; and of course the Trial Lawyers’ Association is driving them.

I’ve worked in big modern corporations and seen their Human Resources departments close up. They are under constant peril of discrimination lawsuits, which are bad for the company’s image and often very expensive.

As a Freedom of Association absolutist, I’d like to see all anti-discrimination laws repealed. They are nothing but a cash cow for the trial lawyers. Their effect on our economy, and on our social harmony, is entirely negative.

Joy Pullman has a very good article arguing this case over at The Federalist this week. Money quote:

Outcome equality is simply incompatible with procedural equality. If we apply the same rules equally to all people, we will get some disparate group outcomes, because people are different. We must therefore choose whether we want equality before the law or unequal preferences in an attempt to engineer outcome equality. Google, and liberals at large, attempt to have both, but the two are fundamentally incompatible, as Google is painfully discovering. It’s Time To End All Discrimination Policies And Restore Equal Protection, August 10, 2017

It follows from that, by the way, that while I embrace James Damore as a kindred spirit, I’m sorry to see that he is getting lawyered up over his dismissal.

Again: Freedom of Association absolutism is the rule at Radio Derb. Any employer should be able to fire anyone at any time for any reason, or for no reason at all. Being fired from a job should, in my opinion, be no more litigable than being dumped by a girlfriend … although I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the trial-lawyer parasites are working on that one, too.

Sex equality: back to the Paleolithic

Before leaving the case of James Damore and Google, I can’t resist the opportunity for a little self-advertisement.

After I invited conservative commentator John Derbyshire in 2016 to speak about race and national identity, one student angrily told me that if the speech wasn’t canceled, Mr. Derbyshire wouldn’t make it through the door in one piece.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “You can’t be serious.”

The student paused, leaned over the table and looked me in the eye: “Whatever it takes, he will not make it through that door.”

I had received criticism before and had my character attacked, but a face-to-face physical threat was something new. Two days later, the college president banned Mr. Derbyshire from campus.

So the movements of guests on the Williams College campus are controlled by violent thugs. And those thugs have the support of the college administration.

Good to know … especially if you are the parent of a highschooler checking out colleges to apply to.

(Republished from VDare.com by permission of author or representative)

You don’t, I’ve learned, have to lay out forty-five dollars for the full Jomo Kenyatta deal. There are electronic alternatives—basically hand-held bug zappers—that are way cheaper. I have ordered one (this one) and shall report back on its efficacy.

I have also been advised to just get a nice big floppy hat. Apparently that keeps bugs at bay, at least around the head and neck area.

Supposing I were to go for the Jomo Kenyatta classic fly whisk, would people think I was gay, I asked? A reader (in a good-natured, not abusive, post): “No, but they might think you daft and clumsy.”

That I could live with. For that reader’s personal safety and career prospects, though, I should note that the word “clumsy” is seriously microaggressive and might get you fired from, for example, Google. The term approved by PC Central is “dyspractic.”

You probably are aware that [this] appeared as problem A6 on the 1966 Putnam exam. The solution in the Putnam book for the period 1965 – 1984 shows that your first question (does the expression have a finite value?) is much more difficult to answer than the second (what is the value if it exists?)

I wasn’t in fact aware of that—thank you, Sir.

And yes: In math, existence (that it is) is often harder to prove than essence (what it is). I have an intuitive inkling—please don’t ask me to justify it—that the two kinds of problems appeal to two different personality types, existentialists and essentialists.

I’m an essentialist; I always found existence proofs a tiresome chore, though of course I appreciate the necessity.

I am always amazed at how the worst of our popular culture catches on abroad.

I feel your pain, Sir, but you have to look at it from the point of view of a kid in 1957 England, awash in pre-Beatles English pop music, which was dire. The name Cliff Richard mean anything?

Clive James was growing up in Australia around the same time. In that country immediately after WW2, for years the only cars you could get were British cars. James says in his autobiography that when the first Volkswagens came ashore down under, they were greeted like liberators.

We English urchins welcomed Country & Western, even Appalachian folk music, in the same spirit. On BBC radio there used to be a half-hour program called Smoky Mountain Jamboree that was required listening for musically avant-garde teens over there. (Our parents of course hated it.)

I can find very few traces of that program on the Internet, only some disconnected scraps like this. Perhaps that’s just as well. “Never go back” … although I do think Lonnie Donegan is worth making an exception for.

As a pre-Information Age relic, my default format is the essay. For events like this, I first write out an essay, then boil it down to PowerPoint slides.

PowerPoint is performance art (“Power corrupts: PowerPoint corrupts absolutely”—Roger Kimball), so the presentation had additions and subtractions from what’s written below. Subtractions especially: “Better too much than too little” is my rule.

Introduction

With all the chatter about the Alt Right that came up in last year’s election season, Jared Taylor has been doing some interviews recently. The interviewer—this one, for example—generally opens by asking: “What is your organization, this American Renaissance, all about? What do you stand for?”

Jared commonly gives a two-part answer.

First, he says, we are a white advocacy group, speaking up on behalf of the collective interests of white Americans and pushing back against the anti-white rhetoric that pervades our culture.

Second, we are race-realist, seeking to promote honest, open discussion about race differences and their implications for social policies, especially immigration, education, and law enforcement.

You have heard, or will be hearing, white advocacy from Jared himself and from other speakers at this conference. In this talk I am going to turn my plow into the other field. I am going to talk about race realism, and about the opposite thing: race denialism.

Let me define these two positions: race realism and race denialism.

Race realism is the point of view that:

Like any other widely-distributed species, Homo sapiens is divided into local varieties—races—that differ in their biology.

Where races show different statistical profiles on heritable traits—physiognomy, metabolism, disease susceptibility, and the BIP traits (Behavior, Intelligence, Personality)—it is reasonable to infer that biological differences are causal factors.

Biological race differences work together with adscititious factors (history, geography, epidemiology) to shape social outcomes.

The opposite of race realism is race denialism.

Race denialism is the point of view that:

Observed group differences between local varieties of Homo sap. are superficial and inconsequential, like the hair color of individuals.

The different statistical profiles of races on BIP traits and social outcomes are entirely caused by historical and social factors. Biology plays no part.

My approach here will be chronological. I’m going to take a look at the present of both race realism and race denialism; then at the past; then I’ll offer some speculations about the future.

The Present Situation, West and East

The intellectual climate in the West today is one of guerilla race realism.

The commanding heights of Western societies—media, schools, politics—are held by race denialists.

Race denialism is a social dogma. All respectable people are required to affirm it.

Ever more educated, thoughtful citizens observe persistent patterns in group social outcomes that contradict official dogma. (The thoughtcrime of Noticing.) They conclude that the race-denialist Emperor has no clothes.

We now know that the way we talk about race has no scientific validity. There is no genetic basis that corresponds with any particular group of people, no essentialist DNA for black people or white people or anyone … There are genetic characteristics that associate with certain populations, but none of these is exclusive, nor correspond uniquely with any one group that might fit a racial epithet.

Race doesn’t exist, racism does. But we can now confine it to opinions and not pretend that there might be any scientific validity in bigotry.

Indeed. Some sub-Saharan Africans, of entirely local ancestry, have white skin. They are albinos.

This week, as it happens, there’s been an unusual quantity of good news out of Washington D.C.— not great, throw-your-hat-in-the-air news; but hopeful news, news about our government moving in the right direction—above all, on immigration.

It ends chain migration. At present, if you are a citizen or legal permanent resident, you can sponsor your parents, your siblings, and your adult children for permanent residence. No longer: Under the proposed reform, it’ll be spouse and dependent children only.

It ends the so-called “diversity lottery,” which gives permanent residence to 50,000 random people from anywhere, by lottery from the millions who apply–14½ million in 2015, the last year we have numbers for. Almost half of those were from Africa.

It caps refugee numbers at 50,000 in any year.

Applicants for permanent residence would be graded on a points system, with points decided by age, education credentials, English-language skills, professional awards, investment resources, and job offers.

Guest workers would have to show job offers paying more than what is being paid to local Americans.

Those are highlights. You can read the entire bill at Senator Perdue’s congressional website. [PDF]It’s called the RAISE Bill: R-A-I-S-E, stands for “Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy.”

From my point of view, the proposed bill is a curate’s egg: good in parts.

Cutting back chain migration to just spouse and dependent children, for instance, is a very sensible reform. Likewise dumping the horrible, stupid “diversity lottery.” Diversity, above the minimal salt-in-the-stew level, creates nothing but trouble. We can’t taste the stew, we’ve dumped so much salt in it.

There are some nits to pick, though. The refugee cap is way too high, for instance. Fifty thousand a year? Here are government figures for the actual number of refugees admitted in fiscal years 2016, -15, -14, -13, and -12, in thousands: 85, 70, 70, 70, 58. So fifty thousand is a very modest reduction.

Given that, as I have explained, refugees and ourselves are all better off if they’re parked in countries with similar cultures; and given also that, as documented in detail by Ann Coulter in ¡Adios America!, the refugee program is addled with fraud, the proper ceiling here: ZERO.

The guest-worker reform would quickly be gamed by smart immigration lawyers, just as they have gamed the present system, where employers are supposed to show they can’t find an American worker to hire. Employers go through the motions on that, but everyone knows it’s bogus.

Most problematic in the President’s proposal: the points-based system–giving permanent residence to the smartest, best-credentialed foreigners.

The long-term result of that, as VDARE.com has occasionally noted, is that the legacy nation might end up working for an overclass of smart Asians. That’s a recipe for racial resentment and civic disorder here in America. (I mean, of course, yet more racial resentment and yet more civic disorder).

It also strips poor countries of their most talented people. I couldn’t personally care less about that, but most Americans are more moralistically inclined than I am. People who claim to fret about world poverty should be asked why it’s good to enrich America by making poor countries poorer.

My ideal immigration policy is minimalist: a policy that serves Americans, and one that Americans can understand:

Hatefest in Tennessee

This month’s big event was the annual conference of American Renaissance in Tennessee over the last weekend. It was a great success—the best of the several AmRen conferences I’ve attended.

One difference with previous AmRen conferences in this location is that the anti-white protestors (practically all of them, of course, white themselves—Goodwhites) were allowed to stand right outside the main door of the conference center, instead of on the other side of the parking lot as formerly. This change apparently resulted from legal pressure.

This made no difference to us attendees inside, other than to give us and the protestors close looks at each other through the conference-center windows. It did, though, probably lead to the first ever punch-up between one of ours and several of theirs, reported at the end of AmRen’s own conference report.

Nobody seems to know how the fight got started; I’ve heard several different stories. Local law enforcement apparently doesn’t post police reports online, other than for traffic incidents, so we’ll have to wait for legal proceedings.

Whatever: He’s our guy. Dissident Right doesn’t leave its wounded on the battlefield. A funding site has been set up for his medical and legal costs. I’ve donated, and I hope you will too.

Alt Right rising

It’s getting to be a cliché at AmRen conferences, but it’s a happy one: The attendees get younger every year. Scanning the conference hall on Saturday I saw a couple of guys who prompted the thought: “How did they get here? They don’t look old enough to drive.”

Speaker Julian Langness

The blogger Z-man attended this year’s conference, his first ever, and wrote a very good three-part diary (here, here, and here) about it. From Part I:

The age of the crowd was the first thing I noticed. There were many people there in the under-30 age bracket. There were lot of guys in their 40’s and 50’s too. The average age was probably early 40’s and there were quite a few women in attendance.

Later, in Part III, Z-man contrasted that with the protestors, as seen through the conference hall windows.

I was standing in front of the big glass windows watching the Antifa loonies, when I turned and looked at the young AmRen guys taking pics and selfies, laughing and enjoying themselves. On one side of the glass were grotesquely out of shape people in grubby clothes, smoking and gesticulating. On the other were young men in suits, well groomed and composed. It was one of those times when you can stand on the timeline of your life and see the past and the future at the same time.

Indeed. Something’s happening here, and it’s a privilege to be a part of it. I only wish I’d been born fifty years later.

Audacious is the getting-younger cliché incarnate. He looks way too young to have as much worldly smarts as he shows in his blogging.

At an after-conference private gathering, our own James Kirkpatrick—who, notwithstanding he describes himself as “a Beltway veteran,” I personally would card if he tried to buy beer in my checkout lane at the supermarket—gave an eloquent talk full of insights about this.

Why would they have any market share? Conservatism, Inc. has accomplished nothing. Heritage, Cato, AEI, NRI … all that scholarly lucubration, all those millions in funds, and Conservatism, Inc. couldn’t even pass Health-Care Reform. Our borders are wide open to anyone that cares to stroll in, American citizenship counts for nothing, the Afghanistan war is in its sixteenth futile year, and they’re fine with it all.

Why would any patriotic young person support these arm-flappers?

Did any of them, with all their overflowing treasure chests, contribute anything to last year’s election victory? If they did, it must have been inadvertent: they all hated Trump.

A great living American

I can’t leave the topic of July’s AmRen conference without a deep bow of respect to Jared Taylor, who founded AmRen.

As the Z-man wrote, and as I said at the beginning of my conference presentation, Jared has been pressing on doggedly with his project—white advocacy, race realism—for a quarter of a century now, through innumerable difficulties and setbacks, and against a stiff headwind of opposition from the dominant culture—including, of course, Conservatism, Inc.

Now all that labor is bearing fruit. This year, for the first time ever, Jared had to turn people away; the conference center was just not big enough for all who wanted to attend. My advice to Jared would be to think ahead some and book Yankee Stadium for the 2020 conference.

Success couldn’t happen to a better man. I’ve been saying for years that if our civilization survives, there will one day be statues to Jared in public squares all over the country.

While of course I wish no ill to persons of either inclination, a homosexual neocon would not be my first choice of companion on an expedition up the Limpopo, so I opened Strange Death with low expectations.

I put it down at last in a much better mood. Murray’s written a useful and interesting book, that I hope will be widely read.

Murray’s subject is the catastrophe that has been visited on Europe—including Britain, and with some side commentary on British-settler nations—by mass Third World immigration, especially of Muslims, in the decades since WW2.

Where the facts of the situation are concerned, nothing here will be new to followers of VDARE.com. But it’s very handy to have all the stories from these various countries collected together in one place.

Interspersed with these narrative accounts is Murray’s commentary, which is in the voice of a thoughtful, well-educated Englishman who is appalled at the destruction that has been wreaked on the homelands of Western civilization, and by the cowardice and stupidity of Western Europe’s governments. (Eastern Europe is a different story; Murray has things to say about that.)

Murray has some limitations. I’ll mention them in due course. They don’t subtract much from his book, though, and I urge everyone interested in the topics we cover here to read Strange Death.

He is very good on the vindictiveness with which the political and opinion-forming classes have met the concerns of ordinary working- and middle-class Europeans.

Consider for example the case of Luton, a small English town thirty miles north of London. Murray tells the story in Chapter 14.

In 2009 the Royal Anglian Regiment, on their return from Afghanistan, was given a homecoming parade through the town of Luton. This is one of the towns in England in which “white British” are in a minority (45 percent) …

Really? Luton? I recall it from my student days 50 years ago as a sleepy, nondescript dormitory suburb with a car factory, wall to wall “white British.” Forty-five percent? An old northern mill town, I could understand, or an inner-city welfare slum; but Luton?Good Lord!

… and the town has an especially large Muslim community. Many locals turned out for the parade and were angered by the sight of extremists from the Islamist group al-Muhajiroun heckling and protesting the soldiers as they moved through the town centre … Enraged members of the public attempted to confront the protesters, but the British police protected the protesters and threatened the enraged locals with arrest.

My italics.

In the weeks that followed, some of these locals tried to organize a protest opposing the Islamists, but they were prevented from getting to the same Town Hall to which al-Muhajiroun had previously walked.

It was those events that inspired the formation of the English Defence League (EDL), who in subsequent years tried to organize protest all around the U.K.

The subsequent history of the EDL is somewhat more colorful than Murray tells, but there is no doubt that, as he says, “At no stage did the police or local government, the national police or government, consider that the EDL had a point.”

The EDL and its leader, the pseudonymous Tommy Robinson, were relentlessly harassed by the British authorities, while Muslim gangs like the ones that kidnapped and gang-raped white girls in Rotherham and elsewhere were ignored for fear that prosecution of them would be thought “racist.”

It’s been the same all over Western Europe. In 1993 the Swedish tabloid newspaper Expressen published an opinion poll revealing that 63 percent of Swedes wanted immigrants to go back to their home countries. An accompanying op-ed by the paper’s editor-in-chief, Erik Månsson, called this “an opinion bomb about to go off.” The owners of the paper fired Mr. Månsson.

In 2006 a newspaper in Norway reproduced the not-very-offensive Mohammed cartoons whose publication in Denmark had caused a fuss a few months previously. The editor of that newspaper was threatened with prosecution by no less than the Norwegian Prime Minister.

At all points from the 1968 defenestration of Enoch Powell onwards, and still today, the attitude among the European governing and intellectual classes has been that everything will work out just fine so long as native Europeans stop complaining. If they won’t stop, they must be stopped, so that … everything will work out just fine.

Now, deep into the crisis, it is ever more clear that the thick-skulled grumbling proles were right and their masters were wrong. Lord Melbourne comes to mind:

The big issue in Europe is the ongoing invasion from Africa and the Middle East. If G-20 protestors were going to take to the streets and throw Molotov cocktails last weekend, THAT should have been their target. THAT’S the existential threat, the threat to Europe’s future–the future these millennials will have to live in. But that’s not what the G-20 protestors were protesting. Their target: CAPITALISM? We’re coming up to the hundredth anniversary of Lenin overthrowing capitalism in Russia. How’d THAT work out?

Sometimes the world just doesn’t make sense.

Of all of Africa’s 54 nations, only one is a member of the G-20. That would be South Africa (although Guinea and Senegal were guest participants at this year’s summit).

South Africa’s an interesting study. For race realists, it’s also a disconcerting one.

The crime rate is tremendous. South Africa’s homicide rate is in the low-to-middle thirties per hundred thousand. That puts South Africa in the world’s top ten, up there with Jamaica, Honduras, and Guatemala—although not in quite the same league as America’ own St. Louis, Baltimore, and Detroit, all of which have broken fifty per hundred thousand.

A lot of the problems are First World-ish, though. South Africa actually has the ultimate status symbol among First World national vexations: an immigration problem.

The country is doing so well–by African standards, that is–that it’s plagued by illegal aliens from other African countries. There are frequent black-on-black anti-immigration riots. There was a nasty one earlier this year:

The latest anti-immigrant sentiments were set off in a neighborhood south of Johannesburg called Rosettenville, where residents burned down a dozen houses that they said were being used by Nigerians as drug dens and brothels. [South Africa Anti-Immigrant Protests Turn Violent, By Norimitsu Onishi, NYT, February 24, 2017]

For a further claim to First World status, South Africa also has declining fertility, now just above replacement level.

The country’s politics are quite sane by African standards. Given the current levels of hysteria in Washington, D.C., it’s even tempting to say, “by American standards”…but let’s not over-egg the pudding here.

True, it’s a de facto one-party state, with the ANC, the African National Congress, holding power all 23 of these years. The ANC has quite distinct right and left wings, though, economically speaking: a pro-business wing and a pro-labor wing, who bicker constantly. There are significant opposition parties that did well in last year’s municipal elections. One of them won control of Pretoria, one of South Africa’s three capital cities.

(South Africa has three capital cities, one for each constitutional branch: legislature, executive, judiciary. Pretoria’s the executive capital. This seems to me a very good idea, that could be usefully adopted by the U.S.A. Why do we have all three branches located in Washington, D.C.?)

So, hey, we could just as well be talking about Denmark here!

Well, not quite. South Africa adopted the crony-capitalist economic model. Well-paid do-nothing government jobs are dominated by blacks, while the white and Asian–mostly Indian–business classes are left alone to make money. It’s not a bad model–Malaysia’s made it work for coming up to fifty years.

Fertility may be down towards replacement level, but as any demography buff will tell you, that leaves a huge “bulge” from the previous higher rates to work its way through the age cohorts. Millions of young black South African adults are jobless. They are rallying to Julius Malema’s new Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, which is Castro-ist in economics and fiercely anti-white.

The speech of course was grandiloquent. A speech of that kind can hardly be otherwise.

And there are parts of it I’d disagree with. We need to get out of NATO and let Europeans organize their own collective defense, if they have the will. So I’m not as thrilled as the President is about the money pouring into NATO’s coffers.

There was also some polite papering-over of the history of our past solidarity with the Poles, too. Here I can’t resist quoting the story that opens Chapter 13 of Paul Johnson’s Modern Times:

On 10 January 1946, the Tory MP and diarist “Chips” Channon attended a society wedding in London and remarked to another guest, Lady (“Emerald”) Cunard, “how quickly normal life had been resumed. ‘After all,’ I said, pointing to the crowded room, ‘this is what we have been fighting for.’ ‘What,’ said Emerald, ‘are they all Poles?’”

And with the best will in the world towards our President—and I do have the best will in the world towards him—it was hard not to wince, knowing the President’s own personal history then hearing him say that

If we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive.

These are trivial blemishes, though, by comparison with the nuggets of pure gold in the speech. Nuggets like this:

The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?

Those really are the fundamental questions of our time. They are the questions on the mind of every thoughtful patriot in the West, of everyone who cherishes our civilization.

(They are, incidentally, the questions posed by Douglas Murray in his book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, which I took delivery of mid-week. I’ll be posting a full review in due course. Here I just note, at a hundred pages into the book, that it’s one everybody who cares about those big civilizational issues should read).

I’ll allow some modest difference of opinion with our President over exactly who those people are who “would subvert and destroy” our civilization.

Sure: the Muslim fanatics of the Middle East, Africa, and West Asia are in there. They would destroy us if they could.

Much more important in the ranks of our enemies, though, are those of our own people who would open our countries to mass settlement from those regions. Also, those of our own people who hate Western Civ., people to whom Western Civ. is only a catalog of oppression, slavery, colonialism, patriarchy, and cruelty.

These people infest our government bureaucracies, our schools and universities, our media outlets, our churches, our corporations. Do we have the will to face them down, to drain the swamps, clean out the stables, chase the money-lenders from the temples?

Well, that just circles us back to the President’s question. Thank you, Mr. President; thank you, thank you for stating that question out loud for the world to hear.

And you could hardly find a better place then Poland to say it. Protect our borders? The Poles can tell you things about that. They remember very vividly—how could they ever forget? —what happened to their borders 78 years ago, when Stalin and Hitler simultaneously invaded.

Concerning which, by the way—as an old Cold Warrior, but also as a person who just likes to hear the plain truth spoken—I’d like to thank our President all over again for not eliding the monstrous crimes of Soviet Russia.

Leftist historians and media types have been playing that game for decades—very successfully, stuffing Stalin’s crimes down the memory hole. Our politicians have mostly gone along with them. Any ordinary, not-very-attentive citizen of the West knows that Hitler invaded Poland in 1939; nothing like as many know that it was a co-invasion, Hitler and Stalin acting together.

From time to time, our President displays a lack of self-restraint, allowing his inner nitwit to escape from its cage, as in his feuds with Mika Brzezinski and CNN. At least, that how it seems to me in my geezer-like way—I know younger Dissident Righters think it’s hilarious. Still, I can always console myself by reflecting on what a huge, lethal bullet the U.S.A. dodged last November.

By way of illustration, here’s something I picked up from the Twitter thread of anonymous tweeter “tcjfs“—that’s his Twitter handle—who is one of the most prolific and insightful tweeters on the Dissident Right.

Reminder that before Trump, prominent Harvard progs were planning to treat conservatives like "Nazis after 1945": https://t.co/rdy7o5Urie

Several generations of law students and their teachers grew up with federal courts dominated by conservatives. Not surprisingly, they found themselves wandering in the wilderness, looking for any sign of hope. The result: Defensive-crouch constitutionalism, with every liberal position asserted nervously, its proponents looking over their shoulders for retaliation by conservatives (in its elevated forms, fear of a backlash against aggressively liberal positions).

It’s time to stop.

Prof. Tushnet then lays out a program for Leftists, once they have swept to power in last November’s election, seizing all the commanding heights of constitutional jurisprudence.

The whole thing is too long to quote, and written in law-school-professor-speranto, so I’ll just pick out some highlights.

Overrule key cases. Prof. Tushnet offers a list. Head of the list is the 1978 Bakke ruling, that imposed some slight, cautious restraints on Affirmative Action in college admissions, ruling out blatant racial quotas, for example. According to Prof. Tushnet, the ruling amounted to “rejecting all the rationales for Affirmative Action that really matter.”

Deal sternly with what Prof. Tushnet calls “the losers in the culture war.” Quote: “The war’s over, and we won.” Further quote: “Taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.” This is what tjcfs means by treating us like “Nazis after 1945.” Just to remind you, this is a professor of constitutional law at America’s most prestigious law school.

“Exploit the ambiguities and loopholes in unfavorable precedents that aren’t worth overruling.“ The assumption here is that with Mrs. Clinton in the White House, liberal justices would be able to overrule anything at all; but where it’s too much trouble, a precedent should be interpreted with maximum progressive spin.

Be more ideological! Conservatives are too dimwitted consciously to practice ideological jurisprudence, although the results of their rulings are anti-progressive none the less. Progressives should have their ideology always in mind.

John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. His most recent book, published by VDARE.com com is FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle).His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.